What does the fox say?

Photo: Rodrigo Fernández, 2010. Source: Wikimedia

Last week I participated in quinoa sowing in Chivay. As most farmers all over the world usually do, they talked about the weather. We are in the second half of November and it should start to rain soon, yet there is not rain in sight yet.

Pedro, one of the men who helped working the land, said that the rain would be scarce this season. He has observed how certain plants have flowered early; they are desperate because they know that the rain will be late and scarce. ”Nature knows”, he said. Another sign is that the seagulls that usually fly up the river with message of rain haven’t been seen this year.

Most of the farmers I have talked to in Chivay so far, say that the weather and climate is changing. “Earlier the seasons were respected”, the leader of the Water User Organization in Colca Valley (Junta de Usuarios Valle del Colca) told me; but now, it rains when it should not rain and the frost comes at unexpected times.

According to Pedro, earlier farmers used to know how to anticipate and prepare for the year to come. People knew how to read the earth and the plants, and would listen to the birds and animals.

Don Pedro is a leader in his community and has been active in various social organizations. When I interviewed him in October 2011, he talked about the Andean fox, known as zorro in Spanish and atoq in Quechua. The fox appears as a protagonist in many Andean stories, often as a trickster and often interacting with other animals like the condor, the puma or the guinea pig. Anthropologists have also used the figure of the fox in their writings, like José María Arguedas ("El Zorro de Arriba y el Zorro de Abajo"; as a metaphor for the people in the highlands and people on the coast) and Catherine Allen, who analyses the role of the trickster fox in stories (Foxboy: Intimacy andAesthetics in Andean Stories).

Pedro was, however, the first person I heard talking about the actions of the real-life fox and its significance for humans’ ability to predict the weather in Colca Valley. He said: “In these months (September, October) the fox cries in the hills, and when he is choking - ka-ka-ka, that means that it will be a bad year. And when [his crying is] clear, then it will be a good year. The animals manifest themselves; the plants manifest themselves, so then the Andean man observes, reads, and knows what will happen and anticipates.”

Today, however, most people don’t know how to predict and prepare. Pedro blames a loss of culture and knowledge. But also the new climatic changes that implies sudden changes in temperature and humidity makes it harder to anticipate and prepare than it was before.

The nights are colder and the days hotter. As Florencia, one of my female friends in Chivay – farmer, artisan, and market vendor – put it: “It is like the sun is getting closer to the earth”. The day we worked the fields and sowed quinoa seeds was also extremely hot, and the heat made it hard to work – I at least got exhausted by picking stones and old weed under the burning sun.

On that day, there was no snow to be seen on the surrounding mountaintops Ampato, Sabancaya, Hualca Hualca and Mismi, which are known to be “glacier-topped volcanoes”. A couple of days after the sowing, there were some precipitation, but only on the mountaintops, not on the fields.

This picture is taken today – Sunday 24 November – and if you look carefully, you can get a glimpse of some tiny white stripes on the top of Hualca Hualca. Sabancaya is still without any snow. 

Until the rain arrives, the farmers have to irrigate their fields with water from the canals bringing water from the mountain springs.

People still say that the rain will probably arrive for the fiesta for the Virgen of the Inmaculada Concepcion 8 December. Time will show whether don Pedro is right. And we should be listening carefully: What exactly does the fox say?

Peruvian alpacas killed by snow, Norwegian oil and consumer citizens: Can we get back to class and global solidarity?

The political authorities in Caylloma province (department of Arequipa, Southern Peru) has today declared a state of emergency for eight highland districts, where heavy snowfall is killing animals and making life hard for the peasant farmers and herders living there. These people – as most of the population in the Peruvian Andean highlands – are living in extreme poverty. The high mountain area of the Andes has always been a harsh environment to live in; semi-arid and unpredictable weather, strong rain and landslides often threaten the highland communities.

But the heavy snow and rainfalls that have created social emergencies in the recent years are unprecedented. The seasons are getting more irregular and unpredictable: rain, snow, frost and drought come at times of the year when people least expect it and ruin the agricultural cycle and the food production. In spite of heavy rain and snow, however, the general picture is that of melting glaciers, drying springs and declining water supplies.

(Photo: Municipalidad de Caylloma)

These climatic changes in the Andean mountains are caused by global warming. The latest draft report from IPCC states that it is “extremely likely that human influence on climate caused more than half of the observed increase in global average surface temperature from 1951 to 2010”.

I live in Norway, a country that boasts an environmentalist and peaceful attitude towards the world, and yet almost all our wealth comes from the extraction of oil and gas. But are Norwegians willing to sacrifice their wealth to save the global climate? The future of oil extraction is one of the heatedly debated issues before the upcoming elections. Norway’s oil company Statoil wants to expand the oil production to the scenic fishing area Lofoten and Vesterålen. Environmentalist movements and left-wing political parties are campaigning against this. The Green Party (Miljøpartiet De Grønne) has grown incredibly in popularity due to their unwillingness to compromise the earth’s future, and might for the first time get several candidates elected for parliament. The party that most clearly points to the connections between economic and environmental issues, however, is the Red Party (Rødt), who might succeed in getting elected one candidate from Oslo.

The Norwegian author Jan Kjærstad wrote today in thenewspaper Aftenposten about the shift from seeing Norway as a society to a company that should generate economic growth. The social democratic Labour Party (Arbeiderpartiet) used to be a workers’ party fighting for labour rights, solidarity, redistribution of goods, and equality of rights. Now that they have been in power for most of the last century, they are more concerned with saving the banks when they are facing financial crisis (which the banks caused in the first place). People are no longer seen as citizens, but as clients and consumers. This is a global shift. The sociologist Evalina Dagnino writes about how citizenship in Latin America used to be about rights and collective solidarity, but is now about individual responsibility as a private moral duty. The concept of citizenship that grew out of the social popular movements that fought for equality of rights in the 1970s and 1980s, has now acquired a neoliberal meaning and is now all about citizens as consumers. 

The anthropologist Anna Tsing also touches upon this problem of consumer identity in her article about global capitalism, which she calls “supply chain capitalism”, as a system that outsources production to diverse social- economic niches where goods and services can be produced more cheaply: “Such niches are reproduced in performances of cultural identity through which suppliers show their agility and efficiency. Such performances, in turn, are encouraged by new figures of labor and labor power in which making a living appears as management, consumption, or entrepreneurship. These figurations blur the lines between self-exploitation and superexploitation, not just for owner- operators but also for the workers recruited into supplier enterprises. Through such forms of exploitation, supply chain capitalism creates both great wealth and great poverty” (Tsing 2009: 171).

We remember Naomi Klein’s book No Logo about the power of branding. These issues are structural, and the world cannot be changed through shopping. Instead of changing consumer patterns, the whole system of how to organize the world economy would need to change. People shouldn’t be identified through consumption and brands, but according to what they do to make a living: as workers, artists, farmers, employees, students, informal labourers. In Peru and the rest of Latin America, also the self-employed, the market vendors, the small entrepreneurs in the informal sector, and the “precariat” identify with the working class and organize in union-like associations. In other words, we’re back to class. Why did we forget about class? Can we blame the postmodernists? 

(Thanks to Overheating-collegue Elisabeth Schober and the other participants in the Labour reading group for the inspiring discussions yesterday.)

Commodifying Water in Times of Global Warming

I was proud to get my picture from the World's Water Day in Chivay, March 2011, published on the front page of the NACLA Report on the Americas this spring. This was a special issue (volume 46, issue 1, 2013) called "The Climate Debt: Who Profits, Who Pays?"

The background of this issue is that nation-states in the Global South have historically contributed the least to carbon-dioxide emissions but are especially vulnerable to the consequences of climatic shifts because of the damage wrought by extractive industries and the limited resources to cope with such damage.

My article from Peru is called “Commodifying Water in Times of GlobalWarming”. It describes how climate change in the Andes is a kind of chronic disaster that creates winners and losers and leads to power struggles within a water regime that is influenced by individualized responsibilities. The struggle of poor and indigenous people for collective responsibilities in water management is in the article analyzed as an attempt to take control of an uncertain future.

The article and the rest of the issue can be found on NACLA’s webpage: https://nacla.org/edition/8974

Overheating in the Andes (post.doc. project)

Overheating in the Andes: global connections and local articulations of climate change, capitalism and cosmopolitics

This project seeks to explore the intersections of climate change, economic politics, and identity formations in the Peruvian Andes. As the rest of the Global South, Peru contributes very little of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions; in a 2008 world ranking Peru was ranked as number 143 out of 215 with 0.38 metric tons of carbon per capita. Nevertheless, global warming is producing observable effects on temperature, precipitation, seasonality, glacier retreat and water supply in the Peruvian Andes. These climate effects are unevenly distributed, both geographically and socially.

Peru’s national economy is one of the fastest growing in Latin America, and the middle class has been growing during the first decade of the 21^st century. Yet, large parts of the population, like indigenous people in the higher parts of the Southern Andes, are still excluded from this growth, and find themselves increasingly vulnerable in terms of global warming and water scarcity. Peru contains 70 per cent of the world’s tropical glaciers, which are melting in an increasing speed. These glaciers are containers of fresh water and provide a large part of the water used for irrigation and consumption both in rural and urban areas. Therefore, the consequences of rapid meltdown could be devastating.

This research will be based on fieldwork in three places located at different altitudes in the Colca-Majes-Camaná watershed in Southern Peru: a poor herding community in the headwater basin; a province capital where state offices and NGOs are located; and a new town in the Majes irrigation project in the desert, which has developed over the last 30 years due to water channelled from the highlands and migrants coming to seek economic progress. The research will focus on how climate changes is perceived, experienced and articulated by people of different positions in these various localities. The project will scrutinize how people experience and deal with uncertainties and in which ways knowledge and actions are connected to global discourses and movements. 

This project is part of the research project "OVERHEATING. The three crises of globalization: An anthropological history of the 21st century", which is funded by ERC and based at the University of Oslo: http://www.sv.uio.no/sai/english/research/projects/overheating/index.html

‘Todo en la vida se paga’: Negotiating life in Cusco, Peru (Ph.D. thesis, 2011)

Summary: ‘Todo en la vida se paga’: Negotiating life in Cusco, Peru

This thesis is an ethnographic study of entrepreneurial activities and animistic practices in a working class neighbourhood in Cusco, a city in the Peruvian Andes. Drawing on more than two years of fieldwork, the thesis argues that the neoliberal economy of Cusco, at the beginning of the 21^st century, is embedded, not only in sociality, morality and forms of relatedness, but also in an Andean ontology which implies a particular way of seeing relations among persons, places and things.

After three decades of neoliberal restructuring of the economy, economic crisis, and a devastating civil war, today’s Peru is actually witnessing overall economic growth on the national level. However, this is an economy of deep inequalities, where as much as 70 per cent of the labour force works outside the tax system, depriving workers of benefits and protection. Cusco’s economy is characterized by a high degree of underemployment, self-employment, and informality. The thesis examines the activities of people who create their own micro-enterprises in this unstable urban economy. These micro-enterprises are utterly vulnerable in a world where profit margins are extremely low. In this context the thesis explores the cultural conceptualizations of money and profitability, as well as the ambiguous moralities in webs of credit and debt.

The central argument is that a particular Andean “animistic-analogic” ontology, in which mimetic practices constitute a significant part of being-in-the-world, shapes the ways people engage the contemporary neoliberal landscape of economic opportunity and constraint. Mobilising a local idiom ‘everything has to be paid for’, the thesis seeks to explain how the flows of energy and resources are enmeshed in circuits of reciprocal exchange and how the relations between people and other-than-human beings are central to local understandings of wealth generation and social responsibility. By not seeing “nature” and “culture” as separate, the author argues that other-than-human beings, such as the earthmother, mountain spirits, saints and crosses, are relevant and take part in Cusco’s urban economy.

In a world where personhood is accumulative rather than fixed, engaging in social and ritual relations is utterly important. In this light, the thesis explores the tensions between “independence”, social mobility, opportunity and risk on the one hand, and the security of being part of webs of relatedness, that entail more conservative values, on the other. Moreover, the thesis describes how relations of gender, class and kinship are created and negotiated in everyday acts of exchange, stressing the combination of entrepreneurial determination and community values.

The thesis analyses the urban entrepreneurial practices in light of current debates in economic anthropology as well as the work of Andeanist scholars linked to contemporary debates on analogism, perspectivism and the mimetic. This thesis contributes to the ethnographic knowledge of economic life in the Andes in a neoliberal context, and more broadly to the anthropological understanding of the interrelations between economy, sociality and cosmology.